The Adderall Diaries

The Adderall Diaries

As reported by Dollyforme

The sexy Amber Heard stars in this movie and made it worth watching – her screen time

is simply amazing – I just loved her in this little redbox flick.

Adderall Diaries" is a complex, absorbing, at times profound look at how we choose to remember our past. What the script, adapted by director Pamela Romanowsky from the memoir by Stephen Elliott, lacks in cohesion and practicality it makes up for with its risky mélange of ideas, emotions and perspectives.

The film's Stephen Elliott (James Franco) is a notable if self-destructive New York author with a raft of inner demons, most of which have been ascribed — both personally and in print — to his unstable, abusive father, Neil (Ed Harris), who terrorized him as a child. As an adult, the attractive, charismatic Stephen suffers from drug addiction, a dark pursuit of pain and pleasure, and now, a perhaps dubious case of writer's block.

The author's troubles double, however, when the estranged Neil, said to be dead in Stephen's memoir, shows up at a bookstore reading very much alive and publicly brands his son a fraud. This revelation not only reopens a festering filial wound for Stephen but instantly sends his career into a James Frey-like tailspin, to the consternation of his hard-working editor (Cynthia Nixon).

Meanwhile, Stephen has become obsessed with an investigation involving a family man (Christian Slater, quite good) who may or may not have murdered his missing wife. Stirred by apparent parallels to his own fraught past, Stephen begins to follow the high-profile case, through which he meets a sexy New York Times reporter, Lana (Amber Heard), who's covering the story. In an era when celebrity disclosure of childhood trauma is common in media, it’s unusual to encounter an aggrieved memoirist who broadens his perspective on personal history.

“The Adderall Diaries,” based on a 2009 autobiographical book by author Stephen Elliott, is a tough if bumpy account of the writer’s painful but illuminating relationship with an abusive father.

James Franco brings a raw, shadowy authenticity to Stephen, whose twitchy unease with literary success is a signal that something is off. The truth is revealed when Neil (Ed Harris), the father who Elliott claimed was dead in a recent book, shows up at a public reading and humiliates him.

Though Stephen’s deception shatters his career, he is less interested in helping his agent (Cynthia Nixon) with damage control than in losing himself in pills, sadomasochistic sex and — more intriguingly — the murder trial of real-life computer entrepreneur Hans Reiser (Christian Slater).

The latter, a self-described good father accused of killing his wife, strikes a chord with Stephen just when his own ossified self-pity is challenged by Neil, who remembers their family dramas differently than his son.

Writer-director Pamela Romanowsky, in her first feature, captures both fireworks and tragedy in go-for-broke scenes between Franco and Harris. Those emotional peaks bring clarity to Stephen’s murky conflicts, without getting soppy about painful epiphanies or redemption.

Oddly, Romanowsky’s instincts elsewhere run counter to that. Much of “The Adderall Diaries” is too impressionistic to know quite what hell Stephen survived. The film’s biggest scenes are Stephen’s S&M-tinged romance with a reporter (Amber Heard) — is a convenient trope for magnifying his self-destructiveness.

What rescues “Diaries” and its grimy, cracked-glass look is its firm grip on Stephen’s incremental awareness that he and his misery are not the center of the universe. There’s nothing like a character growing up before one’s eyes.

‘The Adderall Diaries,’ with James Franco, Ed Harris, Amber Heard, Cynthia Nixon. Written and directed by Pamela Romanowsky, based on a memoir by Stephen Elliott. 105 minutes. Rated R for language, nudity, drug use.

Movie was way worth a buck at Redbox.